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Comment of the Day: A Dealchaser’s Guide to Monthly Garage Parking Downtown

COMMENT OF THE DAY: A DEALCHASER’S GUIDE TO MONTHLY GARAGE PARKING DOWNTOWN “Do we need more parking downtown? Um, yes. Corporations have bought up many garages and left nothing for everyone else.
I work in the Wells Fargo building, where an unreserved spot costs $400/mo. I had a spot in the Travis Place garage for $150, but Kinder Morgan or El Paso bought all the spots. I got a spot at 919 Milam for $190-ish, and some tenant bought all those spots. Then I got a spot above Pappas BBQ at 1100 Smith, but they kicked out a bunch of parkers (including me) to open up spaces for new tenants at 1100 Louisiana. I tried to get a spot in the Theater District garages, but they have a wait list a mile long. So now I’ve moved to Two Shell, which is $215/mo. Renovations are about to begin there, so I’ll either get the boot again or it will become prohibitively expensive. (Again, all of these prices are for plain-jane unreserved spots. And I can’t take the bus because I am in and out of the car all day.)
So, yes . . . We need more non-corporate parking downtown.” [Montrosian, commenting on Downtown’s New Highrise for Cars Is Going Up!] Photo of Wedge International Tower parking garage: Swamplot inbox

If you live in Montrose or the Heights or another close in neighborhood and paying hundreds a month to park, why not just take the bus? It’s cheap and easy and when I worked downtown I could get to the office in ten or fifteen minutes via Metro. I wish I could take it to the Galleria in under an hour and spend my commute reading instead of driving.

A friend of mine works in Williams Tower in the Galleria, and he said their lot is over capacity – workers are now having to park in the Galleria garages and walk over, or are forced to park in visitor and handicapped spots. Is there not a minimum parking requirement for high rises like there is for other businesses?

@ Superdave: Yes, outside of downtown and the edges of EaDo and Midtown, there are onsite parking requirements. I believe it’s 2.5 spaces per 1,000 sq.ft. usable for office buildings. Most buildings of Williams Tower’s vintage were built around 3.0 per 1,000. However, increasing employee density now leads some occupants to need higher than this, which has apparently happened at Williams Tower.

This is one of the reasons that office building owners in Uptown want better commuter transit service and the BRT improvements – to take the edge off the parking situation.

Uh… I used to park in a garage at louisiana and congress for 100 dollars a month and could come and go all day-no problem.

Now, I do realize that this is the edge of downtown- but I worked across the street from the Alley and it was a very very short walk. Heck even the Alley theatre parking garage was no more than 150/month and that’s pretty close to a lot of stuff in downtown. I moved to NYC in August of 2013 but I can’t imagine prices going up that much between then and now.

(Oh and there was no wait. We had new employees come and go all the time and they would set up their own parking at these two lots with no issue, so check ’em out!)

Travis Place garage filled up because Kinder Morgan tremendously increased the density of employees at the El Paso building post acquisition after they moved all their staff there. I would have thought that would have opened up spots in the Allen center’s garages, which would be reasonably close to Wells Fargo, but who knows